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11 Comments

General CommentIn interviews Bob has said that his songwriting is affected by the fact that he taught grade school kids for so many years, so that his lyrics are often akin to "fairy tales for grown-ups". This one falls into that category, I think.

He seems to be in some kind of alternate world or dimension, and then encounters these "freak" personages. It's similar to the song "Big Boring Wedding"--the one where the chorus goes "pass the word the chicks are back," (a line lifted from a very outdated advertisement I think). In BBW he sings "I have entered a shiny new realm, a very different and very spoiled world...Colin, thank you for such delicious pie."

(hmmm, another "pie" reference... Bob is a fanatical record collector. I wonder--given the prior reference to oral sex--whether he mentally associates "pie" with pudenda. I'm thinking of the notorious album cover from the late '60s or early '70s in which a grandmotherly woman is proferring a pie with one slice already cut out -- and if you look closely at the place where the slice is missing, it looks very much like female genitalia. Sorry can't recall the name of the band or LP, but I think the cover was by far the most memorable thing they did, anyway)

I've wondered whether the lines in "Jar of Cardinals" might also refer to oral sex...specificially: "She was high and I was low/Sitting in a bungalow/Eating something wonderful/Never ever getting full" (hmm, this also has that nursery rhyme quality to it)

I don't think there's any deep meaning here. It's surreal and funny. "I will be eternally hateful" is classic. Bob's ease with wordplay ought to be more celebrated, but I'd guess GbV's music was just too weird to ever have gained a mass audience.

General CommentThis is what I THOUGHT the song was about, before you shattered my illusions:
non-dairy creamer: vegan
fruit cake: mental person who eats fruit (i.e. someone who is crazy to be a vegan)
wet-spot: who'd been laid out (for being a vegan) and was bleeding copiously
new church: crazy vegan religion
they have a tequila; she shows him vegans are cool

this one's on the house (talking about alcohol)

after becoming a vegan, he wanders back one day into a meat-eater's house. The meat-eater has a wider experience of things (hence king everything) and invites him to eat meat with him, in the form of pies and chicken.
He does eat the meat; (hence 'recovery') and the experience leaves him bitter and cynical, turning him into the person who beat up the vegan in the first place.

So it reads like a witty piece of social commentary. 'Should we beat vegans?' Robert Pollard asks ironically, if they drink alcohol. Furthermore, was the protagonist right to join veganism just because they also drink alcohol?

General CommentI'm willing to bet that the meat-eater vs. vegan theory is not what Bob Pollard was going for on this one. Even if this track isn't entirely sexual, I'm sure Bob realized that he made several references to cunnilingus in it (they seem to be pretty obvious).